How Did Nazi Dictatorship Work
How did the Nazi dictatorship work? A review of historiography.
Author: Ron Grant 2010
Introduction: A trawl of Advanced Higher History past papers establishes the importance of awareness of the personality and role of Hitler, his leadership skills – or even lack of them? – and the changing nature of the movement led by him. How did the Nazi party change as it moved from the struggle for power to the “Machtergreifung” of 30 January 1933 and the consolidation of power thereafter? Tim Kirk in Nazi Germany (2007) observes: “It was an approach to government and to leadership that contrasted very starkly with Stalin’s obsessive will to control all aspects of policy.” (P49).
Many years ago, Hugh Trevor-Roper in The Last Days of Hitler …show more content…
(1947) challenged the belief that Nazi Germany was organized as a “totalitarian” state – totally integrated, totally mobilized, centrally controlled. The gullible had swallowed Nazi propaganda whole. Instead, “The structure of German politics and administration, instead of being “pyramidal” and “monolithic”, was in fact a confusion of private empires, private armies, and private intelligence services.” In this feudal anarchy Hitler was no weak dictator. His “personal power was in fact so undisputed that he rode to the end above the chaos he had created.” (p53; p54).
Since this classic of historical scholarship was first published there has followed a huge number of works on the Third Reich, daunting and intimidating to young students. How to make sense of it all? By far the best introduction remains John Hite and Christopher Hinton; “Weimar and Nazi Germany” (2000). With clarity and economy, they explain terms used to describe the Nazi governing machine such as “polycratic”, “feudal” and “chaotic”, proceeding to review “intentionalist” versus “structuralist” interpretations. “How were decisions taken? They ask, before investigating differing notions of Hitler as dictator and the ever-quickening radical momentum which characterised the Third Reich (pp206; 196/7; 190/2).
But it is now a decade since this essential student guide appeared. Since then the second volume of Ian Kershaw’s biography of “Hitler: Nemesis 1936 – 1945” (2000) Michael Burleigh: “The Third Reich: a new history” (2000), Richard J Evans” monumental trilogy depicting Nazism’s rise and fall and Adam Tooze: “The Wages of Destruction: the making and breaking of the Nazi economy” (2006) have been published (for review essays on the Evans trilogy, Tooze and other new works on the Third Reich, “History Teaching Review: Year Book of the Scottish Association of Teachers of History (SATH)”, 2000/2009 (inclusive) and SATH’s twice yearly Resources Review are essential reading. Would that Hite and Hinton find time and energy to produce an updated edition!
Neil Gregor in “How to read Hitler” (2005) deftly encapsulates recent developments in the interpretation of Nazism and how it worked, noting “the move away from a one-sided stress on institutional conflict as the principal motor of National Socialist radicalization in favour of a renewed emphasis on the importance of human agency, and on cooperation and “shared understanding” between actors. “ (P4) In such a view the Orwellian picture of Germany 1933-1945 as a nation of rabbits duped and transfixed by stoats will not do. Propaganda and terror cannot provide sufficient explanation of the “social contract” between Hitler, the NSDAP and millions of Germans.
It is in this context that detailed explanation of the Dantean circles proceeds.
A Adolf Hitler
“Who is this Hitler? What does he want?” This was the robust enquiry of the woman who dominated the cartoons created in the 1930s by the American humorist, James Thurber. Eight decades later the search for answers continues. One positive emerging from this is that, in terms of Keynesian multiplier effect, Hitler and Nazism has generated significant economic activity, from scholars, writers and teachers to all the areas of the publication industry and to the media industries. What in monetary terms is the value of “the Hitler industry” to Amazon?
In the early 21st Century political leaders chant the mantra of aspiration and upward social mobility. Hitler’s life before 1919 was the negation of this as he hurtled downwards from the petit bourgeoisie to the lumpen fringes of urban life, a social bankrupt, a misfit. In 1919 he was employed by the army to snoop on Munich’s political extremists, and found himself in the company of the tiny, ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic German Worker’s Party. Finally his luck had turned. Joining this group he developed his one real talent – for mob oratory. He quickly became the leader of the Party. Thus, “Hitler vaulted from his post of military policy spy and denizen of the underworld straight into a position of absolute power which he has never since surrendered” (Sebastian Haffner: “Germany – Jekyll and Hyde…” [1940; 2008edn, p16]). Hitler had taken the first steps on his road from Zero to Nero.
The milestones on that path are familiar to any student. But how have historians interpreted Hitler’s rise to power? There are two extremes. In the first, Stalinist Marxists viewed Hitler and his movement as puppets of German capitalist tycoons, an analysis evoked by the photo montage created by John Heartfield: “The Meaning of the Nazi Salute” At the other extreme is the view of Hitler’s first serious biographer Alan Bullock, a classicist by training, author of “Hitler: a study in tyranny” (1952): “Hitler constantly exalted force over the power of ideas and delighted to prove that men were governed by cupidity, fear and their baser passions. The sole theme of the Nazi revolution was domination…” (p804).
By the 1980s these competing interpretations had been fashioned into the rival schools of the “functionalists”, who concentrated on the structure and institutions of the Nazi state, and the “intentionalists”, for whom the Third Reich was the practical expression of the Führer’s will. It was from the first of these two schools that Ian Kershaw emerged to dominate Third Reich historiography by 2000. Trained as a social historian in Munich’s Institute for Contemporary History and creating sociological models drawn from Max Weber, Kershaw subtly wedded social analysis with the peculiar features of Hitler’s individual personality.
Hitler is revealed by him as utterly self-absorbed. He treated humans much as he did his dogs. Relationships with others was based on his power over them and their utter dependence on him. He was convinced of his own genius. His leading courtiers, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler and their like, had had their uses in fashioning his rise to power and its consolidation but he was “the movement’s” creator, Nazism’s alpha and omega. “Once Hitler is uprooted, all the Göring’s and Goebbels will fall like leaves from a dead tree. Not one of them has Hitler’s power of identifying Germany with himself.”(Haffner, op.cit.,pp 30/31).
Any attempt to understand the historical phenomenon of Nazism must therefore begin with Hitler, his core beliefs, his world view, his preaching of “a violent theology of redemptive purification” (Adam Tooze) and the emotional volatility of a man fuelled by resentments and hatreds. Half a century ago “Mein Kampf” was dismissed by AJP Taylor as fantasies dreamt up behind prison bars, it was Hitler’s “lunatic vision” (Taylor’s description of it in conversation with Ved Mehta (“Fly and the Fly-Bottle (1963; 1965 edn, p146). But a new generation of historians, exemplified by Neil Gregor and Adam Tooze redirect readers to serious study of this book and also the lesser-known “Second Book” (1928). In “The Wages of Destruction” (2006) Tooze argues that, at critical junctures on the road to war, Hitler restated the basic themes of “Mein Kampf”. The essence of politics was the historical struggle of nations for life. The arch-foe was “Bolshevism” – or rather (in those hyphenated expressions constantly used by him) “Judaeo – Bolshevism”. “Jewish-Marxism” sought to annihilate the German people. Germany, overpopulated and encircled by the conspirators at Versailles, could only survive by a final solution, that of “lebensraum”, the carving out of a new German empire, in the East. “Mein Kampf” is, in Gregor’s view, “an implicitly genocidal text” (Gregor op cit, p32).
Historians frequently describe how – once in power – politicians have found it difficult to translate the rhetoric that helped them succeed into practice; their opponents gleefully pinpoint their failure to deliver manifesto commitments. It is a commonplace that politicians are tamed by their bureaucrats, the flame of missionary zeal is snuffed out by pragmatic expediency. But in the Third Reich this did not happen. Hitler was not boxed in as von Papen had arrogantly predicted would be the case, in January 1933. Instead a process of dynamic, “cumulative radicalisation” characterised Nazi government as Hitler’s core beliefs were activated.
Yet this was not the result of Hitler’s administrative genius. In many ways he was utterly useless as head of state, presiding over administrative chaos and creating a morass of competing authorities. Lazy, arrogant, profoundly narcissistic, he had “contributed as good as nothing to the running of the massively expanded Nazi Movement” after 1930. Once installed as Chancellor and particularly after the Night of the Long Knives and the death of Hindenburg these character deficiencies became accentuated. In crucial areas of policy he offered not a clear programme but a set of metaphors. How was this tolerated? “Hitler’s style of leadership functioned precisely because of the readiness of all his subordinates to accept his unique standing in the party, and their belief that such … behaviour had simply to be taken on board in someone they saw as a political genius. “(Ian Kershaw: “Hitler, 1889 – 1936: Hubris” 1998, 1999 edn p343, see also Neil Gregor: “Nazism”, Oxford Readers series, 2000, pp125/8).
The “office culture” in Hitler’s daily briefings with aides and Party luminaries was oral rather than written. He left no diaries for posterity (to the embarrassment of Hugh Trevor-Roper fooled into initial acceptance of their discovery in one of History’s most famous “stings”). Hitler detested detailed policy briefings placed before him. He would often scribble his signature to measures which had to be shelved “because of opposition from powerful vested interests” (Richard J Evans: “The Third Reich in Power” 2005, p613). He did, however, take speech writing seriously and would secrete himself away to write these before special occasions in the Party calendar such as the September Nuremberg Rally and the 30 January anniversary of “the seizure of power”.
This indolence, it can be argued, rendered the Nazi regime “toxic”. Unable to get clear-cut written directives and decisions from their lie-a-bed leader, aides, ministers and civil servants struggled to anticipate the Führer’s wishes. The “modus’ operandi” developed by them, early in the Third Reich’s history, was ‘working towards the Führer’ The originator of the concept was one of the regime’s small fry, Weiner Willikens, State Secretary in the Prussian agriculture ministry.
On 21 February 1934 in a speech to fellow civil servants, he said:
“Everyone with opportunity to observe it knows that the Führer can only with great difficulty order from above everything that he intends to carry out sooner or later … (so) it is the duty of every single person to attempt, in the spirit of the Führer, to work towards him. Anyone making mistakes will come to notice it soon enough. But the one who works correctly towards the Führer along his lines and towards his aim will have the finest rewards of one day suddenly attaining the legal confirmation of his work.”
(Found in Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris “op cit p529)
A leading historian of Nazi Germany had thus found a Teutonic version of the Stalybridge gingerbread vendor. (For further explanation see Ron Grant: “Hitler and the Historians” in History Teaching Review: Yearbook of Scottish Association of Teachers of History, Vol.16, 2002, pp48150). In creating the model of “working towards the Führer” had Kershaw treated Nazism as both the outcome of complex social structures and the role of the “great man of History”, Hitler? Is it in tune with what Karl Marx wrote in “The Eighteenth Brumaire?”
“Men make history, but they do not make it just as they please: they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves”.
Assessing the relative weight of the role of the individual and of the structures in which (s)he operates is a measure of any historian’s credibility. Thus, Richard J Evans warns of the danger of under-estimating Hitler’s input into decision-making. His perspective on the Kershaw model is one in which, “basically, the men at the top gave orders deliberately couched in vague terms, and their underlings had learned over the years to interpret their meaning. Significantly, where Hitler was not interested in intervening (e.g. in musical life), Nazi policy was not consistently applied. People may have thought they were working towards the Führer, but they had different ideas of what that meant. If Hitler made a pronouncement on an issue, they all had to work in the same direction” (Richard J Evans to R Grant, 15 July 2004).
And further, “In areas where he did take a real interest, he did not hesitate to give a direct lead, even on matters of detail … it was Hitler who laid down the broad, general principles that policy had to follow.” This may be seen, argues Evans, in the areas of racial policy, foreign policy and preparation for war.” There is a danger when studying these of viewing Hitler as merely reacting to initiatives from his subordinates. (Richard J Evans: “The Third Reich in Power”, op.cit., pp614/5. Accordingly, the arrows in the “circles model” reflect Evans’ argument.
Circle A: Aides, cronies, servants.
Who were the people who saw Hitler most frequently? His valet, Karl Krause, would lay out his clothes for the day and run his late morning bath without ever seeing the Führer disrobed. Krause was to be sacked and replaced by Heinz Linge who stayed with Hitler to the end. Imprisoned by the Soviets until his release in the mid 1950s Linge cashed in, selling his story to the News of the World (Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Last Days of Hitler (1947; 1972edn, p48). Just as Stalin liked to be amused by his jester, Poskrybyshev, so too Hitler was entertained by his butler, Artur Kannenberg, whose forte was singing schmaltzy songs to the accompaniment of an accordion. There is no evidence, however, of Kannenberg aspiring to play Jeeves to the Führer’s Wooster.
Historians of the Third Reich comment on the duality of State power after Hitler became “Leader of the German Reich and People” on Hindenburg’s death. On the one hand there continued to exist the “normative state”, the existing machinery of Ministries, civil servants and bureaucracy governed by existing laws and conventions. But alongside it “there was the ‘prerogative state’, an essentially extra-legal system that derived its legitimation entirely from the supra-legal authority of the leader” (Evans, “Third Reich in Power”, op.cit.p45)
The duality can be observed in this inner circle. Thus, Hans Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellor’s Office was there on a daily basis in Berlin, delivering reports to Hitler, sorting and sifting the Führer’s heavily-laden in-tray, aiding his leader on matters of law and getting the Führer’s signature when necessary. A member of the aristocratic “old gentry”, Lammers had to tolerate the presence in the Chancellery of men whom Kershaw labels as Hitler’s “Bavarian entourage”, adjutants, chauffeurs and minders, Brückner, the thuggish Schaub and Schreck (the replacement driver for Emil Maurice who had had enjoyed some from of liaison with the tragic Geli Raubal). Schaub was a typical “Alte Kämpfer”, at Hitler’s side during the Röhm purge and in his element during “Reichskristallnacht.” This group was nicknamed “the Chauffeureska” by the Falstaffian “Putzi” Hanfstaengl. Their pretence must surely have irritated Lammers with their omnipresence, “often hindering contact, frequently interfering in a conversation with some form of distraction, invariably listening, later backing Hitler’s own impressions and prejudices” (Kershaw, “Hitler: Hubris .. “, op.cit. p485)
But even more odious to Lammers, and embodiment of the “prerogative state” was the emergent figure of Martin Bormann, another “Alte Kämpfer” whose c.v. included an active part in the murder of his former school teacher Walther Kadow. Bormann owed his elevation to Rudolf Hess, having been appointed his Chief of Staff in 1933. Bormann created his own secretariat, emerging as a rival to Lammer’s authority. In 1935, he took over the running of the Obersalzberg, a residence much preferred by Hitler over the Berlin Chancellery. Lammers could do little to thwart Bormann’s ambitions when the Führer was there. Winning the war for Hitler’s ear, having direct access to the Führer, was crucial to the frequently feuding Party barons. As they began to discover, having Bormann onside was of crucial significance.
Circle B: Nazi Leaders.
That it was a coalition government that Hitler headed from 30 January 1933 is perhaps partial explanation for the duality of state power in the Third Reich’s early years. This is why non Nazis such as Konstantin von Neurath, Hjalmar Schacht and Franz von Papen are to be found in this circle.
But it is “Hitler’s Henchmen” (the title of six studies of leading Nazis by the journalist and Head of History for ZDF [German tv channel] Guido Knopp [1996; UK edn, 2000]) who were the chief executives of power. Each of these “courtiers” (the descriptive label used by Trevor-Roper) were masters of the black arts, sycophancy and intrigue, skilled in outmanoeuvring any rival in the ceaseless struggle to win access to the Führer. In this Darwinian struggle weaklings such as Darré, the alcoholic Ley, and the utterly incompetent Hess, were sidelined. (An electronic, inter-active version of this paper might enable users to better understand the shifts and changing balance of power at the court of the Führer. For example by the last six months of the Third Reich “, power beneath Hitler had largely shifted towards four individuals: Goebbels, Bormann, Himmler and Speer (Ian Kershaw to R Grant, 25 January 2010). By this time, Hitler’s designated successor, Göring was a physical wreck, addicted to morphine and grotesquely obese).
An insight into life in this circle is provided by examination of Joachim von Ribbentrop. A late recruit (1 May 1932) to the NSDAP he quickly ingratiated himself with Hitler who in 1933 set up a foreign policy “think tank”, the eponymous Ribbentrop Bureau as a rival to von Neurath’s Foreign Ministry which he considered too conservative. There was no such problem with the oleaginous von Ribbentrop, for whom a desire to please the Führer and ensure his own advancement were two sides of the same coin. His “modus operandi” was, according to an assistant, Erich Kordt, to anticipate Hitler’s opinions “and, if anything to be in advance of Hitler along the path he might follow.” He took to hanging around the lobbies of the Chancellery to “learn from the hangers on what Hitler was thinking” so that he could support the policy as if it were his own (Michael Block: “Ribbentrop”, 1992edn.p82 found in Benjamin Carter Hett: “Crossing Hitler”, 2008, p233).
As Laurence Rees wryly comments, “Hitler, not surprisingly, felt Ribbentrop had fine judgement.” But, in addition, according to Reinhard Spitzy, an official in Germany’s Embassy in London von Ribbentrop always urged the most radical policy options to Hitler. (Laurence Rees: “The Nazis : a warning from history, “ 1997; 1998edn. Pp93;95). Thus von Ribbentrop had calibrated “working towards the Führer” to operate to his advantage and to ensure that Foreign policy careered down the most radical roads.
Some historians have argued that this radicalism is most evident in the sphere of “Jewish policy”. The aims of the Party Leaders, those who rolled their wagons behind the Führer’s chariot maximalised in an environment where their leader had expressed policy targets in broadbrush terms and where an alphabet soup of Party a genius confronted existing State ministries and bureaucracies . There developed a struggle for power and influence among the Nazi satraps. Given Hitler’s obsessive anti-Semitism the most radical initiatives would win his approval.
Such an argument has been advanced to explain the role of Goebbels in the pogrom of Reichskristallnacht (9/10 November 1938). Notoriously priapic, the Propaganda Minister had been forced by Hitler to end his affair with the Czech born Lida Baarova. Anxious at all costs to redeem himself Goebbels seized the opportunity provided by the murder of the diplomat von Rath by the Jewish youth, Grynszpan: “it gave him the chance to vent his hate against the “criminal Jewish rabble” and pose as the most radical of hell-raisers … The man pulling the strings took a furtive delight in the widespread devastation that he had sparked off” (Guido Knopp, “Hitler’s Henchmen, “ op cit. pp 39/40).
However, in his forensic demolition of David Irving’s claims to be regarded as a serious historian, Richard J Evans demonstrated that it was Hitler who gave the signal for the program to proceed (see “Days in the Life of Hitler”, No 3). It had been Hitler who gave the two orders of 9/10 November to ensure that the police would not interfere with the nationwide actions against Jewish families, businesses and synagogues (Richard J Evans: “Telling Lies about Hitler”, 2002, p15; also pp58/75).
Thus the notion of the Party barons jousting for power with an essentially weak Führer needs to be labelled “Handle with care!”
Circle C: Apparatchiks, Fixers – the executive Force of the “Triumph of the Will”.
Some of the names in this circle will be familiar to students: Heydrich and Eichmann especially so. All of the others can be found in the texts referred to in this article. These are the “middle managers” of Nazism, people with mastery of technical, legal, fiscal and military detail. They provide “the knowledge” … and the action.
Were these people mere careerists, making the appropriate loyal noises or were they driven? Did they share Hitler’s anti-Semitism? The Nazi movement, argues Michael Burleigh in “The Third Reich … “ op.cit., was not just a political party. It was a religion with Hitler displacing Christ as redeemer: “The faith which Hitler’s earliest and most committed followers invested in their Führer became a mass phenomenon” (p266). Nazi liturgy dispensed a licence to kill. Neil Gregor has recognised the importance of this in his essay. “Nazism – a political religion?” in “Nazism, War and Genocide: essays in honour of Jeremy Noakes” 2005: “it provides the possibility of an interpretation which combines recognition of the presence of uncontested authority with acknowledgement of the fact that people willingly submitted to it” (p9).
But Burleigh’s book is flawed. His analysis of the Third Reich elides into a tiresome right-wing rant which married to pompous verbosity produces a self-indulgent cleverness. To illustrate: “In brief, scientific certitude, so useful to assail the Church, fused with a Gnostic apodicticism derived from Pelagian heresies within Christianity itself” (Burleigh, op.cit.,p254) Discuss!
Of infinitely greater value is the taut narrative and well-corralled arguments of Mark Roseman in “The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution” (2002; 2003edn). Roseman identifies a generation gap among Nazi bureaucrats which is reflected in the nature of their anti-Semitism.
Thus the Gauleiters typify the thuggish brutality and baiting of “old-style” pogroms. Drawing on the research of Peter Hüttenberger and his sample of twenty-nine Gauleiters. Jeremy Noakes describes their average age in 1933 as 40, with 14 drawn from the so-called “front generation”, born between 1890 and 1900. “Hitler was exceptionally loyal to his Gauleiters, showing remarkable tolerance of their excuses.” (Jeremy Noakes: “Viceroys of the Reich”? Gauleiters 1925-45” in “Working Towards the Führer: essays in honour of Sir Ian Kershaw”, 2003, p124) .
In contrast, “With the expansion of the SD (the SS Intelligence Branch) and the security police a new kind of anti-Semitic grouping emerged – as fanatic and committed as the Party rank and file, but hostile to street violence, seeking a rational and organised solution”.
These men were to spearhead the wartime genocide. But they were younger. Heydrich (born 1904) headed a staff of whom in 1939 two thirds of those in leadership positions were aged 36 or under (Mark Roseman, op.cit., p17)
Mark Mazower: “Hitlers Empire: Nazi rule in Occupied Europe,” 2008) reviewed in SATH Resources Review, No. 41, September 2009) charts the radiating waves of policy pulsing from Himmler to Heydrich and to loyal satraps such as Odibo Globocnic.
In addition when exploring the role of the Nazi judiciary the essay by Anthony McElligott in Anthony McElligott and Tim Kirk (editors) “Working Towards the Führer” op cit is rewarding reading. The contribution by Jeremy Noakes: “Hitler and the Nazi state: leadership, hierarchy and power” in Jane Caplan (editor): “Nazi Germany” 2008 (reviewed in SATH Resources Review, No. 40, February 2009) is crucial to arriving at an understanding of how the Nazi dictatorship operated.
Circle D: “Ordinary Men” … and
Women
For decades historians – understandably – focussed on Hitler and the inner circles (making Louis L Snyder: “Encyclopedia of the Third Reich,” 1976 and several subsequent editions an indispensable companion). But in the 21st Century there has been an increasing emphasis on “grass roots history” and it is now widely accepted that awareness of and complicity in, Nazism’s radical, and criminal, policies was widespread in Germany. Götz Aly, author of “Hitler’s Beneficiaries: how the Nazis bought the German people” (2005; UK edn 2007) has been labelled as “German historiography’s Jonathan Swift” in SATH Year Book, Volume 22, 2008 for the ghastly picture he drew of his compatriots, downplaying coercion and terror, and instead emphasising what he labels as “the accommodating dictatorship” .
Equally important is Peter Fritzsche: “Life and Death in the Third Reich”, 2008 – “history from below” in its exploration of issues such as “How far did Germans support the Nazis?” and enabling students to add further names to Circle D. Fritzsche has written a fascinating description of “writing letters” in his chapter “Empire of Destruction”.
This makes William Sheridan Allen: “The Nazi Seizure of Power: the experience of a single German town, 1922-1945 (1965) all the more remarkable. It was a book years ahead of its time. Five decades later it remains essential reading. Also in this category is Victor Klemperer: “I shall Bear Witness”: the diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1933-1941”(1995; UK edn 1998). Curmudgeon and hypochondriac (rather like that other Victor … Meldrew) his diaries provide a running evaluation of Nazism and its bonds with the people of Dresden. The second volume “To the Bitter End” covers 1941 to 1945 and the remarkable story of how Victor and his wife, Eva, owed their lives to the RAF and its destruction of Dresden (around 25000 Germans died) in February 1945.
But what of the book which gives this circle its label? Christopher Browning: “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland”(1992; 2001 edn) might at first glance appear to be outside the syllabus. However, its author has conducted a remarkable analysis of the mind-set and values of those humdrum Hamburgers who in 1942 were asked to commit terrible crimes. In the methods used by Browning and in his exploration of the blanket term “anti-Semitism “ it is a further addition to the “must read” category and a crucial rebuff to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: ordinary Germans and the Holocaust”, 1996; 1997 edn. It is instructive to compare the two authors’ treatment of Captain Julius Wohlauf and his bride Vera and their bizarre honeymoon.
As historians focus less on Nazism’s inner circles and more on the history of everyday life in the Third Reich so our understanding and reworking of interpretative tools such as “working towards the Führer” will become increasingly sophisticated.
How did the Nazi dictatorship work? The model based on Dante’s vision of Hell-Health warnings!
Open any packet of prescribed medicine and inside it is a manufacturers’ leaflet carrying dire warnings about potential side effects of what your doctor has decided should be your treatment. It is likewise with the explanatory models and metaphors used by historians to explain complex phenomena.
What cautions apply to the “circles” model? A draft version (November 2009) warned that “the diagram does not take into accounts conflicts and tensions between rival individuals and groups. An example is the hostility of many in the SS to the older cadre of Party leaders and functionaries.”
It is important also to remember changes and movements within the circles. Thus within Circle B, the leading Nazis, the draft version reminded readers that “The composition of this peer group changed across the two decades of the Third Reich’s rise and fall. Thus Schacht, Darré and Göring are sidelined or became less influential, in contrast to Goebbels and Himmler.”
Ian Kershaw kindly took time to read the draft version and has made several helpful comments:
• “The main problem I have with your Dante’s Inferno view of the Third Reich is that it makes the structures, seen in the concentric circles, appear more rational than they were. It is difficult in this way to show the overlaps of Party and State at different levels, as well as the various powers of individuals (such as Göring) and the conflicting competencies of, say, The Four-Year Plan and The Economics Ministry etc.” • He notes the “the picture provided by the model is static, whereas there were important shifts and rises and falls of power during the twelve years of the dictatorship.” • “the “military-industrial complex” … needs incorporating properly in the structural framework rather than just being tagged onto the side of it. The military leaders, in particular, were central to the working of the dictatorship in one of its central functions: planning for, then waging, war.” • “However, these points should not be taken to be a negative view of your diagram, even if, for me, the Third Reich seems more like a tangled spider’s web with Hitler at the end of every thread than a clearly shaped set of concentric circles”.
Taking these points into consideration, the disadvantage of the circles model is its static nature, owing to the format in which it is presented. An inter-active digitalised model would enable users to more effectively trace movements within and across the circles, noting the relegation of characters such as Hess and the elevation of his nominal inferior, Bormann.
The circles model would appear much different if applied to Stalin’s dictatorship, where the executioner’s bullet permanently removed many of the elite, allowing others to become more prominent.
As we have seen (on P1 above) Ian Kershaw’s metaphor “Working towards the Führer” was a rejection of the Third Reich as “totalitarian” state and was rooted in the “functionalist-structionalist” interpretation. His crowning triumph was the 2-volume biography of Hitler (1998-2000). It was “a neat trick to colonise the natural territory of the intentionalists with a structuralist biography,” demonstrating “that there was more to Nazism than Hitler’s will” (“Working toward the Führer: essays … “, op.cit. p7)
How has Kershaw written of Hitler since then? Have there been any shifts of emphasis in his explanation of how the Nazi dictatorship worked? In November 2006 he completed “Fateful Choices: ten decisions that changed the world, 1940-1941”(pubd. 2007) in the course of which he described the key features of decision-making in the Nazi regime and the peculiar features of Hitler’s dictatorship.
“Hitler,” Kershaw wrote, “disliked the potential check to his authority posed by any collective body.” Cabinet government atrophied from 1934 as the dualism of party and state created confusion. “Positions on paper often meant little or nothing in reality as power rested with those individuals who could fight their way to the top and had immediate access to Hitler” (ibid, p 59)
Reverting to the bohemianism of his teens and twenties Hitler did not make decisions in the conventional sense of signatures to policy documents or after collaborative discussion. Yet at critical times he could be decisive: “there can be no doubt that the big decisions of foreign policy …. were his.” Ibid, p60)
In “Fateful Choices” Kershaw went no further than 1941. In 2010 his study of the Third Reich in its months of disintegration and collapse will appear, giving readers a final encounter with the Nazi dictatorship at work.
How have younger historians of the Third Reich integrated Kershaw’s model into their own writing? One of the most significant studies of this century’s first decade is the economic history of the Third Reich by Adam Tooze. He pays generous tribute to his predecessors: “Thanks to the work of two generations of historians, we now have a far better understanding of the way in which Nazi ideology conditioned the thought and action of the Nazi leadership and wider German society” (Tooze, op.cit., p (xx)) But, Tooze argues, in so doing, historians have paid insufficient attention to the economy. Hitler took a direct interest in economic policy.
Tooze reminds us that Hitler was not in the habit of writing policy statements “and did so only at decisive moments in the history of the regime” (ibid., p219) Late summer 1936 was one such pivotal moment. Hitler rejected the cautious projections of his Economics Minister, the banker, Hjalmar Schacht, and Reichsbank economists who sought limitation of arms production and diplomatic detente. Instead Hitler launched a strategy of autarky. An umbilical cord linked the Four Year Plan to the Hossbach Memorandum of 5 November 1937. This was further dramatic, and decisive, intervention by Hitler, indicating to his closest advisers that he planned war and so “catapulted the German economy into a dramatically higher level of mobilization”. It was, says Tooze, a process driven by Hitler. No matter that, like Göring, who was put in charge of the Four Year Plan, Hitler was ignorant of economics, with no stomach for mastering the minutiae of industrial policy. What counted was the assertion by Hitler of his authority over economic policy (ibid, p242,; p243) In building his argument on the need to link industrial to military and diplomatic policy Tooze includes a barbed footnote: “ In Kershaw’s monumental biography, the essential issue of steel merits not even a single index entry”. (ibid p719 fn139 to p243).
Tooze also traces the “world view” shaped by Hitler and the apparatchiks of the Nazi military-industrial complex, particularly Herbert Backe. The entry on Backe in Snyder (op cit) needs updating as it ignores Backe’s cooperation with Himmler in the 1940s “in the execution of genocide on an epic scale.” (Tooze, op.cit. p173) This venomous anti-Semite was the author of the “Hunger Plan” prepared at the end of 1940 “which openly envisioned the killing of tens of millions of people within the first twelve months of the German occupation” of the Soviet Union (ibid, p477). Given the discrete features of the structure of politics in the Third Reich, Backe’s radicalism was in tune with that of Himmler. By this time his nominal superior, Darré, was in effect a spent force. Confirmation came as his protégé vaulted over him and became ever more influential.
Racial policy and its evolution within the Nazi dictatorship has been succinctly reviewed by Mark Roseman (Mark Roseman: “The Villa…” op cit). He encapsulates the extreme structuralist view as seeing in “the competition between Hitler’s satraps the driving force that eventually led to genocide … with neither a coherent vision nor a master hand to guide them” (ibid, p11) It envisions Hitler as an indolent, weak dictator. The road to Auschwitz was thus, “a twisted one” (in the phrase used by Karl A. Schlevnes) with no “sat-nav” guiding the Nazi functionaries speedily to their goal.
Roseman urges caution. Firstly, Hitler’s authority over both Party and state was unchallengeable after the events of 1934. The broad mass of Germans were loyal to their Führer: “Hitler, true enough, was often slow to act. But the system became so attuned to his signals that a raised finger was enough.”(ibid, p12) Further, “it was Hitler who set the radical new tone in the second half of the 1930s” (ibid p13) in the policy areas of mobilizing the economy for war, ramping up Foreign policy (and, as we have seen, jettisoning conservative, cautionary voices) and intensifying anti-Jewish measures.
A final point to be made when assessing how the dictatorship functioned and what metaphors or images help explain this is that there must be a recognition of historians’ intensified focus on the outermost of the circles: “where once historians focussed on the coercive dimensions of Nazi rule, they are now inclined to see it as rooted in consensus … (one of) collaborators enacting a shared vision. Where once historians entertained the idea that most Germans were passive bystanders to the crimes of a relatively small number of activists, they now focus on the participation of the many.” (Neil Gregor: “Nazism – a political relgion …?” op.cit., p8)
How the Nazi dictatorship worked : Student tasks
Task 1 : Use the circles and accompanying notes to explain the concept of “Working towards the Führer.” Illustrate your writing with “case histories” drawn from the mini-biographies created by you of the people in the circles.
This can be done on your own or with a fellow student. Share and discuss your findings as a group. You may also, as a group, wish to prepare a group evaluation of the concept.
Remember that the circles only contain a representative sample. As your studies proceed, as you read more, you will be able to add more characters to the circles. (For example, where would you place Hans Frank?)
At the moment Circle D is sparsely inhabited. But increasingly historians are populating this circle. See, for example Peter Fritzsche: “Life and Death in the Third Reich”(2008). On reading it you may wish to add Erich Ebermayer and Elisabeth Gebensleben to Circle D. Blank circles sheets are available for your use.
It is now widely accepted that awareness, knowledge and understanding of Nazism’s criminal policies was widespread among the German people. Although it lies beyond 1939 Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men”, op.cit. , will help you understand the responsibility and culpability of many Germans in the outermost circle.
To help you here are some “pathways” across the circles:
• Hitler Bouhler Eggert Hitler von Ribbentrop • Hitler Himmler Laundau Hitler Goebbels • Hitler Mutschmann Girmann Hitler Himmler Heydrich • Hitler Göring Todt Globocnic • Hitler Scholtz-Klink Maschmann
Task 2: The issue is this: “Adolf Hitler: strong leader or weak dictator?” Use the sheets in the “Days in the Life of Adolf Hitler” series to enable you to answer the question above.
Task 3: Essay [NQ Advanced Higher Paper 2009]
“To what extent is it an exaggeration to claim that Hitler was a strong dictator?”
← Use the Marks Scheme posted on the SQA web-site to assist you. ← But, try to find and use historians other than those referred to in the Marks Scheme.
Task 4: Source Practice
Source A from Questions on German History, introduction by Lothar Gall (1998).
“Government in the Third Reich was characterised by power struggles, conflicts of jurisdiction, growing frictions and inefficiency … the administrative chaos gave leading figures in the party a chance to pursue goals of their own, and created a vacuum in which radical National Socialist policies could evolve without hindrance. Hitler himself refused to be bound by any rational criteria of efficient government or to commit himself to a specific programme.”
← How fully does Source A explain the way government operated in Nazi Germany? 12 marks [refer 2003 Paper for Source and for the Marks Scheme. The 2003 question has been reworded to conform with current practice]
|“How did the Nazi dictatorship work?” – Creating mini biographies of some of the figures found in the four circles. |
|Compiling thumb-nail sketches of the characters listed below will help you understand their role and significance in the Third Reich. Not all of the |
|characters in Circle B have been listed as you should already by fairly familiar with them. The bullet-pointed texts are all referred to in the earlier|
|notes. Be prepared to add in new names to the circles. You can also search the internet but be aware of the limitations of some sites. |
|1. Herbert Backe C |2. Hans Biebow D |3. Werner Best |
|Tooze |Rees |Snyder |
|See also R Grant’s review of Tooze in SATH Year | |Mazower |
|Book 2007 | | |
|Snyder | | |
|Mazower | | |
|4. Blockwartführers D |5. Philipp Bouhler A |6. Martin Bormann A |
|“Blockwardens” (collective) |Rees |Evans “Third Reich in Power” (“Trip”) |
|Allen |Snyder |Snyder |
|Hite and Hinton |Burleigh |Trevor-Roper |
|Evans:”Third Reich in Power” | |Hite and Hinton |
|7. Wilhelm Brückner A |8. Kurt Daluege C |9. Richard Walther Darré |
|Kershaw “Hitler: Hubris” |Snyder |Tooze |
|Evans “Trip” |Mazower |Evans: “Trip” |
| | |Snyder |
|10. Rudolf Diels C |11. Josef “Sepp” Dietrich A A |12. Otto Dietrich C |
|Snyder |Snyder |Snyder |
|Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |Evans: “Trip” |Evans: “Trip” |
| |Kershaw “Hitler: Hubris” + “Hitler: Nemesis” |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |
|13. Paul Eggert |14. Adolf Eichmann C |15. Roland Freisler C |
|Rees |Snyder |Snyder |
| |Evans “Trip” + “Third Reich at War” (“Traw”) |Evans: “Trip”, “Traw” |
| |Mazower |Roseman |
| |Roseman | |
|16. Walther Funk A |17. Ernst Girmann D |18. Odilo Globocnic C |
|Snyder |Allen |Tooze |
|Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” + “Hitler: Nemesis” | |Snyder |
| | |Roseman |
|19. Reinhard Heydrich C |20. Heinrich Hoffman A |21. Reinhard Höhn C |
|Snyder |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |Mazower |
|Roseman |Snyder | |
|Kershaw: “Hitler: Nemesis” | | |
|22. Mayor Kalix D |23. Hans Kammler C |24. Hans Kerrl C |
|Klemperer |Mazower |Snyder |
| | |Evans: “Trip” |
| | |Kershaw: “Hiter: Nemesis” |
|25. Dr Kleinstuck and son D |26. Erich Koch C |27. Maria Kraus D |
|Klemperer |Noakes in McElligott and Kirk |Rees |
| |Mazower | |
|28. Hans Lammers B |29. Felix Landau D |30.Hartmann Lauterbacher C |
|Evans: “Trip” |Rees |Do an internet search (that goes beyond Wikipedia) |
|Snyder | |Research texts on the Hitler Youth |
|Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” | | |
|31. Robert Ley B |32. Heinz Linge A |33. Victor Lutze C |
|Evans: “Trip” |Kershaw: “Hitler: Nemesis” |Snyder |
|Tooze |Trevor-Roper |Trevor-Roper |
|Snyder | |Evans: “Trip” |
| | |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |
|34. Melita Maschmann D |35. Otto Meissner A |36. Theodor Morell A |
|Evans |Snyder |Trevor – Roper |
| |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |Snyder |
| | |Kershaw: “Hitler:Nemesis” |
|37. Martin Mutschmann C |38. Oswald Pohl C |39. Walter “Panzer” Rowland/Rohland |
|Noakes in McElligott and Kirk |Mazower |C |
|Klemperer |Snyder |Tooze |
|Burleigh | |Kershaw: “Hitler: Nemesis” |
|40. Bernhard Rust B |41. Fritz Sauckel C |42. Julius Schaub A |
|Evans: “Trip” |Snyder |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |
|Snyder |Tooze |Evans: “Trip” |
|43. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink C |44. Julius Schreck A |45. Luise Solmitz D |
|Snyder |Evans:”Trip” |Evans: “Trip”, “Traw” |
|Evans: “Trip” |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |
|46. Walter Steineck D |47. General Georg Thomas C |48. Fritz Todt C |
|Allen |Tooze |Tooze |
| |Kershaw: “Hitler: Nemesis” |Snyder |
| | |Evans: “Trip”; “Traw” |
| | |Kershaw: “Hitler: Nemesis” |
|49. Heinrich Voge D |50. Fritz Wiedemann A |51. Werner Willikens C |
|Allen |Snyder |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |
| |Rees |Rees |
| |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” | |
Author: Ron Grant 2010
Introduction: A trawl of Advanced Higher History past papers establishes the importance of awareness of the personality and role of Hitler, his leadership skills – or even lack of them? – and the changing nature of the movement led by him. How did the Nazi party change as it moved from the struggle for power to the “Machtergreifung” of 30 January 1933 and the consolidation of power thereafter? Tim Kirk in Nazi Germany (2007) observes: “It was an approach to government and to leadership that contrasted very starkly with Stalin’s obsessive will to control all aspects of policy.” (P49).
Many years ago, Hugh Trevor-Roper in The Last Days of Hitler …show more content…
(1947) challenged the belief that Nazi Germany was organized as a “totalitarian” state – totally integrated, totally mobilized, centrally controlled. The gullible had swallowed Nazi propaganda whole. Instead, “The structure of German politics and administration, instead of being “pyramidal” and “monolithic”, was in fact a confusion of private empires, private armies, and private intelligence services.” In this feudal anarchy Hitler was no weak dictator. His “personal power was in fact so undisputed that he rode to the end above the chaos he had created.” (p53; p54).
Since this classic of historical scholarship was first published there has followed a huge number of works on the Third Reich, daunting and intimidating to young students. How to make sense of it all? By far the best introduction remains John Hite and Christopher Hinton; “Weimar and Nazi Germany” (2000). With clarity and economy, they explain terms used to describe the Nazi governing machine such as “polycratic”, “feudal” and “chaotic”, proceeding to review “intentionalist” versus “structuralist” interpretations. “How were decisions taken? They ask, before investigating differing notions of Hitler as dictator and the ever-quickening radical momentum which characterised the Third Reich (pp206; 196/7; 190/2).
But it is now a decade since this essential student guide appeared. Since then the second volume of Ian Kershaw’s biography of “Hitler: Nemesis 1936 – 1945” (2000) Michael Burleigh: “The Third Reich: a new history” (2000), Richard J Evans” monumental trilogy depicting Nazism’s rise and fall and Adam Tooze: “The Wages of Destruction: the making and breaking of the Nazi economy” (2006) have been published (for review essays on the Evans trilogy, Tooze and other new works on the Third Reich, “History Teaching Review: Year Book of the Scottish Association of Teachers of History (SATH)”, 2000/2009 (inclusive) and SATH’s twice yearly Resources Review are essential reading. Would that Hite and Hinton find time and energy to produce an updated edition!
Neil Gregor in “How to read Hitler” (2005) deftly encapsulates recent developments in the interpretation of Nazism and how it worked, noting “the move away from a one-sided stress on institutional conflict as the principal motor of National Socialist radicalization in favour of a renewed emphasis on the importance of human agency, and on cooperation and “shared understanding” between actors. “ (P4) In such a view the Orwellian picture of Germany 1933-1945 as a nation of rabbits duped and transfixed by stoats will not do. Propaganda and terror cannot provide sufficient explanation of the “social contract” between Hitler, the NSDAP and millions of Germans.
It is in this context that detailed explanation of the Dantean circles proceeds.
A Adolf Hitler
“Who is this Hitler? What does he want?” This was the robust enquiry of the woman who dominated the cartoons created in the 1930s by the American humorist, James Thurber. Eight decades later the search for answers continues. One positive emerging from this is that, in terms of Keynesian multiplier effect, Hitler and Nazism has generated significant economic activity, from scholars, writers and teachers to all the areas of the publication industry and to the media industries. What in monetary terms is the value of “the Hitler industry” to Amazon?
In the early 21st Century political leaders chant the mantra of aspiration and upward social mobility. Hitler’s life before 1919 was the negation of this as he hurtled downwards from the petit bourgeoisie to the lumpen fringes of urban life, a social bankrupt, a misfit. In 1919 he was employed by the army to snoop on Munich’s political extremists, and found himself in the company of the tiny, ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic German Worker’s Party. Finally his luck had turned. Joining this group he developed his one real talent – for mob oratory. He quickly became the leader of the Party. Thus, “Hitler vaulted from his post of military policy spy and denizen of the underworld straight into a position of absolute power which he has never since surrendered” (Sebastian Haffner: “Germany – Jekyll and Hyde…” [1940; 2008edn, p16]). Hitler had taken the first steps on his road from Zero to Nero.
The milestones on that path are familiar to any student. But how have historians interpreted Hitler’s rise to power? There are two extremes. In the first, Stalinist Marxists viewed Hitler and his movement as puppets of German capitalist tycoons, an analysis evoked by the photo montage created by John Heartfield: “The Meaning of the Nazi Salute” At the other extreme is the view of Hitler’s first serious biographer Alan Bullock, a classicist by training, author of “Hitler: a study in tyranny” (1952): “Hitler constantly exalted force over the power of ideas and delighted to prove that men were governed by cupidity, fear and their baser passions. The sole theme of the Nazi revolution was domination…” (p804).
By the 1980s these competing interpretations had been fashioned into the rival schools of the “functionalists”, who concentrated on the structure and institutions of the Nazi state, and the “intentionalists”, for whom the Third Reich was the practical expression of the Führer’s will. It was from the first of these two schools that Ian Kershaw emerged to dominate Third Reich historiography by 2000. Trained as a social historian in Munich’s Institute for Contemporary History and creating sociological models drawn from Max Weber, Kershaw subtly wedded social analysis with the peculiar features of Hitler’s individual personality.
Hitler is revealed by him as utterly self-absorbed. He treated humans much as he did his dogs. Relationships with others was based on his power over them and their utter dependence on him. He was convinced of his own genius. His leading courtiers, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler and their like, had had their uses in fashioning his rise to power and its consolidation but he was “the movement’s” creator, Nazism’s alpha and omega. “Once Hitler is uprooted, all the Göring’s and Goebbels will fall like leaves from a dead tree. Not one of them has Hitler’s power of identifying Germany with himself.”(Haffner, op.cit.,pp 30/31).
Any attempt to understand the historical phenomenon of Nazism must therefore begin with Hitler, his core beliefs, his world view, his preaching of “a violent theology of redemptive purification” (Adam Tooze) and the emotional volatility of a man fuelled by resentments and hatreds. Half a century ago “Mein Kampf” was dismissed by AJP Taylor as fantasies dreamt up behind prison bars, it was Hitler’s “lunatic vision” (Taylor’s description of it in conversation with Ved Mehta (“Fly and the Fly-Bottle (1963; 1965 edn, p146). But a new generation of historians, exemplified by Neil Gregor and Adam Tooze redirect readers to serious study of this book and also the lesser-known “Second Book” (1928). In “The Wages of Destruction” (2006) Tooze argues that, at critical junctures on the road to war, Hitler restated the basic themes of “Mein Kampf”. The essence of politics was the historical struggle of nations for life. The arch-foe was “Bolshevism” – or rather (in those hyphenated expressions constantly used by him) “Judaeo – Bolshevism”. “Jewish-Marxism” sought to annihilate the German people. Germany, overpopulated and encircled by the conspirators at Versailles, could only survive by a final solution, that of “lebensraum”, the carving out of a new German empire, in the East. “Mein Kampf” is, in Gregor’s view, “an implicitly genocidal text” (Gregor op cit, p32).
Historians frequently describe how – once in power – politicians have found it difficult to translate the rhetoric that helped them succeed into practice; their opponents gleefully pinpoint their failure to deliver manifesto commitments. It is a commonplace that politicians are tamed by their bureaucrats, the flame of missionary zeal is snuffed out by pragmatic expediency. But in the Third Reich this did not happen. Hitler was not boxed in as von Papen had arrogantly predicted would be the case, in January 1933. Instead a process of dynamic, “cumulative radicalisation” characterised Nazi government as Hitler’s core beliefs were activated.
Yet this was not the result of Hitler’s administrative genius. In many ways he was utterly useless as head of state, presiding over administrative chaos and creating a morass of competing authorities. Lazy, arrogant, profoundly narcissistic, he had “contributed as good as nothing to the running of the massively expanded Nazi Movement” after 1930. Once installed as Chancellor and particularly after the Night of the Long Knives and the death of Hindenburg these character deficiencies became accentuated. In crucial areas of policy he offered not a clear programme but a set of metaphors. How was this tolerated? “Hitler’s style of leadership functioned precisely because of the readiness of all his subordinates to accept his unique standing in the party, and their belief that such … behaviour had simply to be taken on board in someone they saw as a political genius. “(Ian Kershaw: “Hitler, 1889 – 1936: Hubris” 1998, 1999 edn p343, see also Neil Gregor: “Nazism”, Oxford Readers series, 2000, pp125/8).
The “office culture” in Hitler’s daily briefings with aides and Party luminaries was oral rather than written. He left no diaries for posterity (to the embarrassment of Hugh Trevor-Roper fooled into initial acceptance of their discovery in one of History’s most famous “stings”). Hitler detested detailed policy briefings placed before him. He would often scribble his signature to measures which had to be shelved “because of opposition from powerful vested interests” (Richard J Evans: “The Third Reich in Power” 2005, p613). He did, however, take speech writing seriously and would secrete himself away to write these before special occasions in the Party calendar such as the September Nuremberg Rally and the 30 January anniversary of “the seizure of power”.
This indolence, it can be argued, rendered the Nazi regime “toxic”. Unable to get clear-cut written directives and decisions from their lie-a-bed leader, aides, ministers and civil servants struggled to anticipate the Führer’s wishes. The “modus’ operandi” developed by them, early in the Third Reich’s history, was ‘working towards the Führer’ The originator of the concept was one of the regime’s small fry, Weiner Willikens, State Secretary in the Prussian agriculture ministry.
On 21 February 1934 in a speech to fellow civil servants, he said:
“Everyone with opportunity to observe it knows that the Führer can only with great difficulty order from above everything that he intends to carry out sooner or later … (so) it is the duty of every single person to attempt, in the spirit of the Führer, to work towards him. Anyone making mistakes will come to notice it soon enough. But the one who works correctly towards the Führer along his lines and towards his aim will have the finest rewards of one day suddenly attaining the legal confirmation of his work.”
(Found in Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris “op cit p529)
A leading historian of Nazi Germany had thus found a Teutonic version of the Stalybridge gingerbread vendor. (For further explanation see Ron Grant: “Hitler and the Historians” in History Teaching Review: Yearbook of Scottish Association of Teachers of History, Vol.16, 2002, pp48150). In creating the model of “working towards the Führer” had Kershaw treated Nazism as both the outcome of complex social structures and the role of the “great man of History”, Hitler? Is it in tune with what Karl Marx wrote in “The Eighteenth Brumaire?”
“Men make history, but they do not make it just as they please: they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves”.
Assessing the relative weight of the role of the individual and of the structures in which (s)he operates is a measure of any historian’s credibility. Thus, Richard J Evans warns of the danger of under-estimating Hitler’s input into decision-making. His perspective on the Kershaw model is one in which, “basically, the men at the top gave orders deliberately couched in vague terms, and their underlings had learned over the years to interpret their meaning. Significantly, where Hitler was not interested in intervening (e.g. in musical life), Nazi policy was not consistently applied. People may have thought they were working towards the Führer, but they had different ideas of what that meant. If Hitler made a pronouncement on an issue, they all had to work in the same direction” (Richard J Evans to R Grant, 15 July 2004).
And further, “In areas where he did take a real interest, he did not hesitate to give a direct lead, even on matters of detail … it was Hitler who laid down the broad, general principles that policy had to follow.” This may be seen, argues Evans, in the areas of racial policy, foreign policy and preparation for war.” There is a danger when studying these of viewing Hitler as merely reacting to initiatives from his subordinates. (Richard J Evans: “The Third Reich in Power”, op.cit., pp614/5. Accordingly, the arrows in the “circles model” reflect Evans’ argument.
Circle A: Aides, cronies, servants.
Who were the people who saw Hitler most frequently? His valet, Karl Krause, would lay out his clothes for the day and run his late morning bath without ever seeing the Führer disrobed. Krause was to be sacked and replaced by Heinz Linge who stayed with Hitler to the end. Imprisoned by the Soviets until his release in the mid 1950s Linge cashed in, selling his story to the News of the World (Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Last Days of Hitler (1947; 1972edn, p48). Just as Stalin liked to be amused by his jester, Poskrybyshev, so too Hitler was entertained by his butler, Artur Kannenberg, whose forte was singing schmaltzy songs to the accompaniment of an accordion. There is no evidence, however, of Kannenberg aspiring to play Jeeves to the Führer’s Wooster.
Historians of the Third Reich comment on the duality of State power after Hitler became “Leader of the German Reich and People” on Hindenburg’s death. On the one hand there continued to exist the “normative state”, the existing machinery of Ministries, civil servants and bureaucracy governed by existing laws and conventions. But alongside it “there was the ‘prerogative state’, an essentially extra-legal system that derived its legitimation entirely from the supra-legal authority of the leader” (Evans, “Third Reich in Power”, op.cit.p45)
The duality can be observed in this inner circle. Thus, Hans Heinrich Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellor’s Office was there on a daily basis in Berlin, delivering reports to Hitler, sorting and sifting the Führer’s heavily-laden in-tray, aiding his leader on matters of law and getting the Führer’s signature when necessary. A member of the aristocratic “old gentry”, Lammers had to tolerate the presence in the Chancellery of men whom Kershaw labels as Hitler’s “Bavarian entourage”, adjutants, chauffeurs and minders, Brückner, the thuggish Schaub and Schreck (the replacement driver for Emil Maurice who had had enjoyed some from of liaison with the tragic Geli Raubal). Schaub was a typical “Alte Kämpfer”, at Hitler’s side during the Röhm purge and in his element during “Reichskristallnacht.” This group was nicknamed “the Chauffeureska” by the Falstaffian “Putzi” Hanfstaengl. Their pretence must surely have irritated Lammers with their omnipresence, “often hindering contact, frequently interfering in a conversation with some form of distraction, invariably listening, later backing Hitler’s own impressions and prejudices” (Kershaw, “Hitler: Hubris .. “, op.cit. p485)
But even more odious to Lammers, and embodiment of the “prerogative state” was the emergent figure of Martin Bormann, another “Alte Kämpfer” whose c.v. included an active part in the murder of his former school teacher Walther Kadow. Bormann owed his elevation to Rudolf Hess, having been appointed his Chief of Staff in 1933. Bormann created his own secretariat, emerging as a rival to Lammer’s authority. In 1935, he took over the running of the Obersalzberg, a residence much preferred by Hitler over the Berlin Chancellery. Lammers could do little to thwart Bormann’s ambitions when the Führer was there. Winning the war for Hitler’s ear, having direct access to the Führer, was crucial to the frequently feuding Party barons. As they began to discover, having Bormann onside was of crucial significance.
Circle B: Nazi Leaders.
That it was a coalition government that Hitler headed from 30 January 1933 is perhaps partial explanation for the duality of state power in the Third Reich’s early years. This is why non Nazis such as Konstantin von Neurath, Hjalmar Schacht and Franz von Papen are to be found in this circle.
But it is “Hitler’s Henchmen” (the title of six studies of leading Nazis by the journalist and Head of History for ZDF [German tv channel] Guido Knopp [1996; UK edn, 2000]) who were the chief executives of power. Each of these “courtiers” (the descriptive label used by Trevor-Roper) were masters of the black arts, sycophancy and intrigue, skilled in outmanoeuvring any rival in the ceaseless struggle to win access to the Führer. In this Darwinian struggle weaklings such as Darré, the alcoholic Ley, and the utterly incompetent Hess, were sidelined. (An electronic, inter-active version of this paper might enable users to better understand the shifts and changing balance of power at the court of the Führer. For example by the last six months of the Third Reich “, power beneath Hitler had largely shifted towards four individuals: Goebbels, Bormann, Himmler and Speer (Ian Kershaw to R Grant, 25 January 2010). By this time, Hitler’s designated successor, Göring was a physical wreck, addicted to morphine and grotesquely obese).
An insight into life in this circle is provided by examination of Joachim von Ribbentrop. A late recruit (1 May 1932) to the NSDAP he quickly ingratiated himself with Hitler who in 1933 set up a foreign policy “think tank”, the eponymous Ribbentrop Bureau as a rival to von Neurath’s Foreign Ministry which he considered too conservative. There was no such problem with the oleaginous von Ribbentrop, for whom a desire to please the Führer and ensure his own advancement were two sides of the same coin. His “modus operandi” was, according to an assistant, Erich Kordt, to anticipate Hitler’s opinions “and, if anything to be in advance of Hitler along the path he might follow.” He took to hanging around the lobbies of the Chancellery to “learn from the hangers on what Hitler was thinking” so that he could support the policy as if it were his own (Michael Block: “Ribbentrop”, 1992edn.p82 found in Benjamin Carter Hett: “Crossing Hitler”, 2008, p233).
As Laurence Rees wryly comments, “Hitler, not surprisingly, felt Ribbentrop had fine judgement.” But, in addition, according to Reinhard Spitzy, an official in Germany’s Embassy in London von Ribbentrop always urged the most radical policy options to Hitler. (Laurence Rees: “The Nazis : a warning from history, “ 1997; 1998edn. Pp93;95). Thus von Ribbentrop had calibrated “working towards the Führer” to operate to his advantage and to ensure that Foreign policy careered down the most radical roads.
Some historians have argued that this radicalism is most evident in the sphere of “Jewish policy”. The aims of the Party Leaders, those who rolled their wagons behind the Führer’s chariot maximalised in an environment where their leader had expressed policy targets in broadbrush terms and where an alphabet soup of Party a genius confronted existing State ministries and bureaucracies . There developed a struggle for power and influence among the Nazi satraps. Given Hitler’s obsessive anti-Semitism the most radical initiatives would win his approval.
Such an argument has been advanced to explain the role of Goebbels in the pogrom of Reichskristallnacht (9/10 November 1938). Notoriously priapic, the Propaganda Minister had been forced by Hitler to end his affair with the Czech born Lida Baarova. Anxious at all costs to redeem himself Goebbels seized the opportunity provided by the murder of the diplomat von Rath by the Jewish youth, Grynszpan: “it gave him the chance to vent his hate against the “criminal Jewish rabble” and pose as the most radical of hell-raisers … The man pulling the strings took a furtive delight in the widespread devastation that he had sparked off” (Guido Knopp, “Hitler’s Henchmen, “ op cit. pp 39/40).
However, in his forensic demolition of David Irving’s claims to be regarded as a serious historian, Richard J Evans demonstrated that it was Hitler who gave the signal for the program to proceed (see “Days in the Life of Hitler”, No 3). It had been Hitler who gave the two orders of 9/10 November to ensure that the police would not interfere with the nationwide actions against Jewish families, businesses and synagogues (Richard J Evans: “Telling Lies about Hitler”, 2002, p15; also pp58/75).
Thus the notion of the Party barons jousting for power with an essentially weak Führer needs to be labelled “Handle with care!”
Circle C: Apparatchiks, Fixers – the executive Force of the “Triumph of the Will”.
Some of the names in this circle will be familiar to students: Heydrich and Eichmann especially so. All of the others can be found in the texts referred to in this article. These are the “middle managers” of Nazism, people with mastery of technical, legal, fiscal and military detail. They provide “the knowledge” … and the action.
Were these people mere careerists, making the appropriate loyal noises or were they driven? Did they share Hitler’s anti-Semitism? The Nazi movement, argues Michael Burleigh in “The Third Reich … “ op.cit., was not just a political party. It was a religion with Hitler displacing Christ as redeemer: “The faith which Hitler’s earliest and most committed followers invested in their Führer became a mass phenomenon” (p266). Nazi liturgy dispensed a licence to kill. Neil Gregor has recognised the importance of this in his essay. “Nazism – a political religion?” in “Nazism, War and Genocide: essays in honour of Jeremy Noakes” 2005: “it provides the possibility of an interpretation which combines recognition of the presence of uncontested authority with acknowledgement of the fact that people willingly submitted to it” (p9).
But Burleigh’s book is flawed. His analysis of the Third Reich elides into a tiresome right-wing rant which married to pompous verbosity produces a self-indulgent cleverness. To illustrate: “In brief, scientific certitude, so useful to assail the Church, fused with a Gnostic apodicticism derived from Pelagian heresies within Christianity itself” (Burleigh, op.cit.,p254) Discuss!
Of infinitely greater value is the taut narrative and well-corralled arguments of Mark Roseman in “The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution” (2002; 2003edn). Roseman identifies a generation gap among Nazi bureaucrats which is reflected in the nature of their anti-Semitism.
Thus the Gauleiters typify the thuggish brutality and baiting of “old-style” pogroms. Drawing on the research of Peter Hüttenberger and his sample of twenty-nine Gauleiters. Jeremy Noakes describes their average age in 1933 as 40, with 14 drawn from the so-called “front generation”, born between 1890 and 1900. “Hitler was exceptionally loyal to his Gauleiters, showing remarkable tolerance of their excuses.” (Jeremy Noakes: “Viceroys of the Reich”? Gauleiters 1925-45” in “Working Towards the Führer: essays in honour of Sir Ian Kershaw”, 2003, p124) .
In contrast, “With the expansion of the SD (the SS Intelligence Branch) and the security police a new kind of anti-Semitic grouping emerged – as fanatic and committed as the Party rank and file, but hostile to street violence, seeking a rational and organised solution”.
These men were to spearhead the wartime genocide. But they were younger. Heydrich (born 1904) headed a staff of whom in 1939 two thirds of those in leadership positions were aged 36 or under (Mark Roseman, op.cit., p17)
Mark Mazower: “Hitlers Empire: Nazi rule in Occupied Europe,” 2008) reviewed in SATH Resources Review, No. 41, September 2009) charts the radiating waves of policy pulsing from Himmler to Heydrich and to loyal satraps such as Odibo Globocnic.
In addition when exploring the role of the Nazi judiciary the essay by Anthony McElligott in Anthony McElligott and Tim Kirk (editors) “Working Towards the Führer” op cit is rewarding reading. The contribution by Jeremy Noakes: “Hitler and the Nazi state: leadership, hierarchy and power” in Jane Caplan (editor): “Nazi Germany” 2008 (reviewed in SATH Resources Review, No. 40, February 2009) is crucial to arriving at an understanding of how the Nazi dictatorship operated.
Circle D: “Ordinary Men” … and
Women
For decades historians – understandably – focussed on Hitler and the inner circles (making Louis L Snyder: “Encyclopedia of the Third Reich,” 1976 and several subsequent editions an indispensable companion). But in the 21st Century there has been an increasing emphasis on “grass roots history” and it is now widely accepted that awareness of and complicity in, Nazism’s radical, and criminal, policies was widespread in Germany. Götz Aly, author of “Hitler’s Beneficiaries: how the Nazis bought the German people” (2005; UK edn 2007) has been labelled as “German historiography’s Jonathan Swift” in SATH Year Book, Volume 22, 2008 for the ghastly picture he drew of his compatriots, downplaying coercion and terror, and instead emphasising what he labels as “the accommodating dictatorship” .
Equally important is Peter Fritzsche: “Life and Death in the Third Reich”, 2008 – “history from below” in its exploration of issues such as “How far did Germans support the Nazis?” and enabling students to add further names to Circle D. Fritzsche has written a fascinating description of “writing letters” in his chapter “Empire of Destruction”.
This makes William Sheridan Allen: “The Nazi Seizure of Power: the experience of a single German town, 1922-1945 (1965) all the more remarkable. It was a book years ahead of its time. Five decades later it remains essential reading. Also in this category is Victor Klemperer: “I shall Bear Witness”: the diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1933-1941”(1995; UK edn 1998). Curmudgeon and hypochondriac (rather like that other Victor … Meldrew) his diaries provide a running evaluation of Nazism and its bonds with the people of Dresden. The second volume “To the Bitter End” covers 1941 to 1945 and the remarkable story of how Victor and his wife, Eva, owed their lives to the RAF and its destruction of Dresden (around 25000 Germans died) in February 1945.
But what of the book which gives this circle its label? Christopher Browning: “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland”(1992; 2001 edn) might at first glance appear to be outside the syllabus. However, its author has conducted a remarkable analysis of the mind-set and values of those humdrum Hamburgers who in 1942 were asked to commit terrible crimes. In the methods used by Browning and in his exploration of the blanket term “anti-Semitism “ it is a further addition to the “must read” category and a crucial rebuff to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: ordinary Germans and the Holocaust”, 1996; 1997 edn. It is instructive to compare the two authors’ treatment of Captain Julius Wohlauf and his bride Vera and their bizarre honeymoon.
As historians focus less on Nazism’s inner circles and more on the history of everyday life in the Third Reich so our understanding and reworking of interpretative tools such as “working towards the Führer” will become increasingly sophisticated.
How did the Nazi dictatorship work? The model based on Dante’s vision of Hell-Health warnings!
Open any packet of prescribed medicine and inside it is a manufacturers’ leaflet carrying dire warnings about potential side effects of what your doctor has decided should be your treatment. It is likewise with the explanatory models and metaphors used by historians to explain complex phenomena.
What cautions apply to the “circles” model? A draft version (November 2009) warned that “the diagram does not take into accounts conflicts and tensions between rival individuals and groups. An example is the hostility of many in the SS to the older cadre of Party leaders and functionaries.”
It is important also to remember changes and movements within the circles. Thus within Circle B, the leading Nazis, the draft version reminded readers that “The composition of this peer group changed across the two decades of the Third Reich’s rise and fall. Thus Schacht, Darré and Göring are sidelined or became less influential, in contrast to Goebbels and Himmler.”
Ian Kershaw kindly took time to read the draft version and has made several helpful comments:
• “The main problem I have with your Dante’s Inferno view of the Third Reich is that it makes the structures, seen in the concentric circles, appear more rational than they were. It is difficult in this way to show the overlaps of Party and State at different levels, as well as the various powers of individuals (such as Göring) and the conflicting competencies of, say, The Four-Year Plan and The Economics Ministry etc.” • He notes the “the picture provided by the model is static, whereas there were important shifts and rises and falls of power during the twelve years of the dictatorship.” • “the “military-industrial complex” … needs incorporating properly in the structural framework rather than just being tagged onto the side of it. The military leaders, in particular, were central to the working of the dictatorship in one of its central functions: planning for, then waging, war.” • “However, these points should not be taken to be a negative view of your diagram, even if, for me, the Third Reich seems more like a tangled spider’s web with Hitler at the end of every thread than a clearly shaped set of concentric circles”.
Taking these points into consideration, the disadvantage of the circles model is its static nature, owing to the format in which it is presented. An inter-active digitalised model would enable users to more effectively trace movements within and across the circles, noting the relegation of characters such as Hess and the elevation of his nominal inferior, Bormann.
The circles model would appear much different if applied to Stalin’s dictatorship, where the executioner’s bullet permanently removed many of the elite, allowing others to become more prominent.
As we have seen (on P1 above) Ian Kershaw’s metaphor “Working towards the Führer” was a rejection of the Third Reich as “totalitarian” state and was rooted in the “functionalist-structionalist” interpretation. His crowning triumph was the 2-volume biography of Hitler (1998-2000). It was “a neat trick to colonise the natural territory of the intentionalists with a structuralist biography,” demonstrating “that there was more to Nazism than Hitler’s will” (“Working toward the Führer: essays … “, op.cit. p7)
How has Kershaw written of Hitler since then? Have there been any shifts of emphasis in his explanation of how the Nazi dictatorship worked? In November 2006 he completed “Fateful Choices: ten decisions that changed the world, 1940-1941”(pubd. 2007) in the course of which he described the key features of decision-making in the Nazi regime and the peculiar features of Hitler’s dictatorship.
“Hitler,” Kershaw wrote, “disliked the potential check to his authority posed by any collective body.” Cabinet government atrophied from 1934 as the dualism of party and state created confusion. “Positions on paper often meant little or nothing in reality as power rested with those individuals who could fight their way to the top and had immediate access to Hitler” (ibid, p 59)
Reverting to the bohemianism of his teens and twenties Hitler did not make decisions in the conventional sense of signatures to policy documents or after collaborative discussion. Yet at critical times he could be decisive: “there can be no doubt that the big decisions of foreign policy …. were his.” Ibid, p60)
In “Fateful Choices” Kershaw went no further than 1941. In 2010 his study of the Third Reich in its months of disintegration and collapse will appear, giving readers a final encounter with the Nazi dictatorship at work.
How have younger historians of the Third Reich integrated Kershaw’s model into their own writing? One of the most significant studies of this century’s first decade is the economic history of the Third Reich by Adam Tooze. He pays generous tribute to his predecessors: “Thanks to the work of two generations of historians, we now have a far better understanding of the way in which Nazi ideology conditioned the thought and action of the Nazi leadership and wider German society” (Tooze, op.cit., p (xx)) But, Tooze argues, in so doing, historians have paid insufficient attention to the economy. Hitler took a direct interest in economic policy.
Tooze reminds us that Hitler was not in the habit of writing policy statements “and did so only at decisive moments in the history of the regime” (ibid., p219) Late summer 1936 was one such pivotal moment. Hitler rejected the cautious projections of his Economics Minister, the banker, Hjalmar Schacht, and Reichsbank economists who sought limitation of arms production and diplomatic detente. Instead Hitler launched a strategy of autarky. An umbilical cord linked the Four Year Plan to the Hossbach Memorandum of 5 November 1937. This was further dramatic, and decisive, intervention by Hitler, indicating to his closest advisers that he planned war and so “catapulted the German economy into a dramatically higher level of mobilization”. It was, says Tooze, a process driven by Hitler. No matter that, like Göring, who was put in charge of the Four Year Plan, Hitler was ignorant of economics, with no stomach for mastering the minutiae of industrial policy. What counted was the assertion by Hitler of his authority over economic policy (ibid, p242,; p243) In building his argument on the need to link industrial to military and diplomatic policy Tooze includes a barbed footnote: “ In Kershaw’s monumental biography, the essential issue of steel merits not even a single index entry”. (ibid p719 fn139 to p243).
Tooze also traces the “world view” shaped by Hitler and the apparatchiks of the Nazi military-industrial complex, particularly Herbert Backe. The entry on Backe in Snyder (op cit) needs updating as it ignores Backe’s cooperation with Himmler in the 1940s “in the execution of genocide on an epic scale.” (Tooze, op.cit. p173) This venomous anti-Semite was the author of the “Hunger Plan” prepared at the end of 1940 “which openly envisioned the killing of tens of millions of people within the first twelve months of the German occupation” of the Soviet Union (ibid, p477). Given the discrete features of the structure of politics in the Third Reich, Backe’s radicalism was in tune with that of Himmler. By this time his nominal superior, Darré, was in effect a spent force. Confirmation came as his protégé vaulted over him and became ever more influential.
Racial policy and its evolution within the Nazi dictatorship has been succinctly reviewed by Mark Roseman (Mark Roseman: “The Villa…” op cit). He encapsulates the extreme structuralist view as seeing in “the competition between Hitler’s satraps the driving force that eventually led to genocide … with neither a coherent vision nor a master hand to guide them” (ibid, p11) It envisions Hitler as an indolent, weak dictator. The road to Auschwitz was thus, “a twisted one” (in the phrase used by Karl A. Schlevnes) with no “sat-nav” guiding the Nazi functionaries speedily to their goal.
Roseman urges caution. Firstly, Hitler’s authority over both Party and state was unchallengeable after the events of 1934. The broad mass of Germans were loyal to their Führer: “Hitler, true enough, was often slow to act. But the system became so attuned to his signals that a raised finger was enough.”(ibid, p12) Further, “it was Hitler who set the radical new tone in the second half of the 1930s” (ibid p13) in the policy areas of mobilizing the economy for war, ramping up Foreign policy (and, as we have seen, jettisoning conservative, cautionary voices) and intensifying anti-Jewish measures.
A final point to be made when assessing how the dictatorship functioned and what metaphors or images help explain this is that there must be a recognition of historians’ intensified focus on the outermost of the circles: “where once historians focussed on the coercive dimensions of Nazi rule, they are now inclined to see it as rooted in consensus … (one of) collaborators enacting a shared vision. Where once historians entertained the idea that most Germans were passive bystanders to the crimes of a relatively small number of activists, they now focus on the participation of the many.” (Neil Gregor: “Nazism – a political relgion …?” op.cit., p8)
How the Nazi dictatorship worked : Student tasks
Task 1 : Use the circles and accompanying notes to explain the concept of “Working towards the Führer.” Illustrate your writing with “case histories” drawn from the mini-biographies created by you of the people in the circles.
This can be done on your own or with a fellow student. Share and discuss your findings as a group. You may also, as a group, wish to prepare a group evaluation of the concept.
Remember that the circles only contain a representative sample. As your studies proceed, as you read more, you will be able to add more characters to the circles. (For example, where would you place Hans Frank?)
At the moment Circle D is sparsely inhabited. But increasingly historians are populating this circle. See, for example Peter Fritzsche: “Life and Death in the Third Reich”(2008). On reading it you may wish to add Erich Ebermayer and Elisabeth Gebensleben to Circle D. Blank circles sheets are available for your use.
It is now widely accepted that awareness, knowledge and understanding of Nazism’s criminal policies was widespread among the German people. Although it lies beyond 1939 Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men”, op.cit. , will help you understand the responsibility and culpability of many Germans in the outermost circle.
To help you here are some “pathways” across the circles:
• Hitler Bouhler Eggert Hitler von Ribbentrop • Hitler Himmler Laundau Hitler Goebbels • Hitler Mutschmann Girmann Hitler Himmler Heydrich • Hitler Göring Todt Globocnic • Hitler Scholtz-Klink Maschmann
Task 2: The issue is this: “Adolf Hitler: strong leader or weak dictator?” Use the sheets in the “Days in the Life of Adolf Hitler” series to enable you to answer the question above.
Task 3: Essay [NQ Advanced Higher Paper 2009]
“To what extent is it an exaggeration to claim that Hitler was a strong dictator?”
← Use the Marks Scheme posted on the SQA web-site to assist you. ← But, try to find and use historians other than those referred to in the Marks Scheme.
Task 4: Source Practice
Source A from Questions on German History, introduction by Lothar Gall (1998).
“Government in the Third Reich was characterised by power struggles, conflicts of jurisdiction, growing frictions and inefficiency … the administrative chaos gave leading figures in the party a chance to pursue goals of their own, and created a vacuum in which radical National Socialist policies could evolve without hindrance. Hitler himself refused to be bound by any rational criteria of efficient government or to commit himself to a specific programme.”
← How fully does Source A explain the way government operated in Nazi Germany? 12 marks [refer 2003 Paper for Source and for the Marks Scheme. The 2003 question has been reworded to conform with current practice]
|“How did the Nazi dictatorship work?” – Creating mini biographies of some of the figures found in the four circles. |
|Compiling thumb-nail sketches of the characters listed below will help you understand their role and significance in the Third Reich. Not all of the |
|characters in Circle B have been listed as you should already by fairly familiar with them. The bullet-pointed texts are all referred to in the earlier|
|notes. Be prepared to add in new names to the circles. You can also search the internet but be aware of the limitations of some sites. |
|1. Herbert Backe C |2. Hans Biebow D |3. Werner Best |
|Tooze |Rees |Snyder |
|See also R Grant’s review of Tooze in SATH Year | |Mazower |
|Book 2007 | | |
|Snyder | | |
|Mazower | | |
|4. Blockwartführers D |5. Philipp Bouhler A |6. Martin Bormann A |
|“Blockwardens” (collective) |Rees |Evans “Third Reich in Power” (“Trip”) |
|Allen |Snyder |Snyder |
|Hite and Hinton |Burleigh |Trevor-Roper |
|Evans:”Third Reich in Power” | |Hite and Hinton |
|7. Wilhelm Brückner A |8. Kurt Daluege C |9. Richard Walther Darré |
|Kershaw “Hitler: Hubris” |Snyder |Tooze |
|Evans “Trip” |Mazower |Evans: “Trip” |
| | |Snyder |
|10. Rudolf Diels C |11. Josef “Sepp” Dietrich A A |12. Otto Dietrich C |
|Snyder |Snyder |Snyder |
|Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |Evans: “Trip” |Evans: “Trip” |
| |Kershaw “Hitler: Hubris” + “Hitler: Nemesis” |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |
|13. Paul Eggert |14. Adolf Eichmann C |15. Roland Freisler C |
|Rees |Snyder |Snyder |
| |Evans “Trip” + “Third Reich at War” (“Traw”) |Evans: “Trip”, “Traw” |
| |Mazower |Roseman |
| |Roseman | |
|16. Walther Funk A |17. Ernst Girmann D |18. Odilo Globocnic C |
|Snyder |Allen |Tooze |
|Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” + “Hitler: Nemesis” | |Snyder |
| | |Roseman |
|19. Reinhard Heydrich C |20. Heinrich Hoffman A |21. Reinhard Höhn C |
|Snyder |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |Mazower |
|Roseman |Snyder | |
|Kershaw: “Hitler: Nemesis” | | |
|22. Mayor Kalix D |23. Hans Kammler C |24. Hans Kerrl C |
|Klemperer |Mazower |Snyder |
| | |Evans: “Trip” |
| | |Kershaw: “Hiter: Nemesis” |
|25. Dr Kleinstuck and son D |26. Erich Koch C |27. Maria Kraus D |
|Klemperer |Noakes in McElligott and Kirk |Rees |
| |Mazower | |
|28. Hans Lammers B |29. Felix Landau D |30.Hartmann Lauterbacher C |
|Evans: “Trip” |Rees |Do an internet search (that goes beyond Wikipedia) |
|Snyder | |Research texts on the Hitler Youth |
|Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” | | |
|31. Robert Ley B |32. Heinz Linge A |33. Victor Lutze C |
|Evans: “Trip” |Kershaw: “Hitler: Nemesis” |Snyder |
|Tooze |Trevor-Roper |Trevor-Roper |
|Snyder | |Evans: “Trip” |
| | |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |
|34. Melita Maschmann D |35. Otto Meissner A |36. Theodor Morell A |
|Evans |Snyder |Trevor – Roper |
| |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |Snyder |
| | |Kershaw: “Hitler:Nemesis” |
|37. Martin Mutschmann C |38. Oswald Pohl C |39. Walter “Panzer” Rowland/Rohland |
|Noakes in McElligott and Kirk |Mazower |C |
|Klemperer |Snyder |Tooze |
|Burleigh | |Kershaw: “Hitler: Nemesis” |
|40. Bernhard Rust B |41. Fritz Sauckel C |42. Julius Schaub A |
|Evans: “Trip” |Snyder |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |
|Snyder |Tooze |Evans: “Trip” |
|43. Gertrud Scholtz-Klink C |44. Julius Schreck A |45. Luise Solmitz D |
|Snyder |Evans:”Trip” |Evans: “Trip”, “Traw” |
|Evans: “Trip” |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |
|46. Walter Steineck D |47. General Georg Thomas C |48. Fritz Todt C |
|Allen |Tooze |Tooze |
| |Kershaw: “Hitler: Nemesis” |Snyder |
| | |Evans: “Trip”; “Traw” |
| | |Kershaw: “Hitler: Nemesis” |
|49. Heinrich Voge D |50. Fritz Wiedemann A |51. Werner Willikens C |
|Allen |Snyder |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” |
| |Rees |Rees |
| |Kershaw: “Hitler: Hubris” | |